Rare books, manuscripts and ephemera from five centuries

Spreading German through London 

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WENDEBORN, Gebhard Friedrich August. THE ELEMENTS OF GERMAN GRAMMAR... Dedicated, by Permission, to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales. London: Printed for C. Heydinger, MDCCLXXIV [1774]. £1,100

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FIRST EDITION. 12mo in 6s, pp. xii. 156; woodcut vignette on title-page and headpiece; tear with loss of paper to lower corner of C5, but not touching text; occasional pencilled markings, and some light browning, but otherwise clean and fresh; in contemporary sheep, flat spine with gilt morocco lettering-piece; some wear to boards and extremities; exlibris stamp of Graham Jefcote on front free endpaper.

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Scarce first edition of this influential introduction to German grammar for English-speakers, by Gebhard Wendeborn (1742-1811) Minister of the German Church on Ludgate Hill in London. 

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‘Wendeborn... was the first to treat German explicitly as a language of literature and culture …  [He] seems to have believed that over-long grammars had contributed to putting learners off German … so kept his grammar comparatively short …  In keeping with the growing interest in German culture, Wendeborn … reproduced two chapters of Tacitus’s Germania in German and literal English translation … followed by “A Specimen of German Print.  From Gellert’s Lectures on Morality” …

 

‘Wendeborn’s grammar was reviewed in 1775 in the Critical Review: “As German literature is at present of much greater consequence than is commonly apprehended, we join with the author in wishing, that it were more attended to, and that this Grammar may be an inducement and a help to the study of it, for at present we know scarce anything of it, excepting through the medium of French translation.”  Of particular interest in this climate of hunger for German literature is Wendeborn’s “Catalogue of Some of the best German modern writers [pp. [153]–156]” (Nicola McLelland, German through English Eyes, 2015, pp. 57–8), which features Gessner, Klopstock, Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, Wieland, and more.

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Wendeborn studied in Halle before moving to England in 1767. In addition to his work on German grammar (which saw a revision, under the title An Introduction to German Grammar, in 1790), he also wrote a column about London for a Hamburg newspaper from 1779 until his return to Hamburg in 1793. He is best remembered for his Der Zustand des Staats, der Religion, der Gelehrsamkeit und der Kunst in Großbritannien gegen Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts, published between 1784 and 1788 and translated into English by the author in 1791 under the title A View of England Towards the Close of the Eighteenth Century. 

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Outside Continental Europe, OCLC records physical copies at Duke, Miami, Penn State, UCLA, UCL, St Andrews, and Aberdeen. 

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